That’s the starting point for Mike Bartlett’s “King Charles III”, a pungent post-Elizabeth II fantasy about the nobility and stability. Written in blank verse, no less, complete with soliloquies, the faux sequel to Shakespeare’s history plays is expertly performed, especially by Tim Pigott-Smith as Charles, and stylishly directed with stark pomp by Rupert Goold. Chris’s William, meanwhile, gets to reveal his own princely mettle in a thrilling, no-holds-barred encounter with Charles, during which he delivers a passionate, audience-pleasing denunciation of his father’s shabby treatment of Diana, his mother.
“King Charles III” is charged, exciting theater and its star is, to borrow a phrase, every inch a king. Still, there is the business to be done, including the Royal assent on bills passed by Parliament. Next, there’s a misandrist streak here for the ages one departs with the notion that royal males are oafish, and the U.K.is run by emboldened women. “Without my voice and spirit, I am dust/This is not what I want, but what I must”, says the new king, who fears he’ll become “A weakling shadow of what went before”. The queen is dead, long live the King. Adam James adds heft as the prime minister at odds with Charles. The confab hits an obstacle quickly, though.
From there, “King Charles III” dives into the profound response by tax-paying countrymen to interference by a member of the royal family with their elected representatives. It’s the kind of performance you’d call Shakespearean in scope. (The irony is not lost here, of a man hounded and pilloried by the news media becoming the defender.) This single act of defiance, though, lights a fire that Charles can not extinguish. Kate (Lydia Wilson) and Camilla (Margot Leicester) are manipulative and ambitious enough to have learned from Lady Macbeth.
Were Pigott-Smith not so effective in conveying Charles’s convictions, this narrative would crumble like a day-old scone. Tafleen Steen does lovely work as a commoner who meets Harry (ginger-haired firecracker Richard Goulding) in a bar and fosters in him dreams of an ordinary existence. Diana (Sally Scott) appears briefly with prophecies about a greatness that stir the pot.
Under the smooth direction of Rupert Goold, “King Charles III” is an entertaining, provocative, highly stylized thriller.
Even of you’ve little interest in these figures, King Charles III will never leave you bored. And just as incisively, the London-born play, which had its official Broadway opening Sunday night at the Music Box Theatre, wants us to consider the Windsors, particularly the younger generation, not merely as aristocratic anachronisms, but as stealthy, worldly power players, mindful of their institution’s historic role and determined to preserve it.
